spinning-wheel

plural spinning-wheels

1. datedDated form of spinning wheel.

   Round about them was a circle of girls and wives of the neighbouring tenants; "they trod the spinning-wheels with diligent feet, or were using the scraping carding-combs," as an author has it.

   1886, Peter Christen Asbjø￵rnsen, translated by H.L. Brækstad, Folk and Fairy Tales, page 251

   4 more examples

   […] while the noonday light, softened perhaps by a screen of leaves, falls on her mob-cap, and just touches the rim of her spinning-wheel, and her stone jug, and all those cheap common things which are the precious necessaries of life to her;—[…]

   1859, George Eliot [pseudonym; Mary Ann Evans], “In Which the Story Pauses a Little”, in Adam Bede […], volume II, Edinburgh; London: William Blackwood and Sons, →OCLC, book second, page 5

   In the days of spinning-wheels and home-woven cloth, &c., it was customary to affix Swatches to the various rolls of cloth sent to the dyer's, which in this part of Cleveland were marked with the initials of the sender.

   1868, J. C. Atkinson, A Glossary of the Cleveland Dialect: Explanatory, Derivative, and Critical, London: John Russell Smith, Soho Square, →OCLC, page 512

   Among much that was curious, there were tables with raised edges of delicate workmanship, holding some fine old china; there was a small oak spinning-wheel, on which my grandmother spun; and standing alone, too modern for its surroundings, was a piano-forté, on which Miss Green played.

   1870, Sketches from the Border Land; or, A Daughter of England, London: F. Bowyer Kitto, […], page 9

   Her modest dwelling was sparsely furnished: an old bed with spiral bedposts and curtains of yellowed serge; a hutch where she kneaded and kept bread; a chest of walnut, clean and shiny but riddled with wormholes plugged with wax, testimony to long years of service; a chair with faded upholstery worn out at the top by her grandmother’s trembling head; a spinning-wheel sleek and smooth from use.

   2018 fall, Théophile Gautier, translated by J. E. Rivers, “The Child Whose Shoes Were Made of Bread”, in Delos: A Journal of Translation and World Literature, volume 33, number 2